I took out my notes and started working on my set, frantically trying to remove material to get it down to five minutes. For a moment, I felt like one of the regular comics. Soon, an absurdly tall dude with a shaven head, a mustache that already made him look funny, and an oversized blue button-down shirt walked in. “Hey, everybody, let me get y’all attention,” he said in a deep voice. “I’m the host, TuRae Gordon. Let me see the list.”
He grabbed it and scanned it. He seemed to know every name there except one.
“Kev Hart, aka Lil’ Kev the Bastard—who’s that?”
“That’s me.”
He then said the three words that will turn any new performer’s jitters into a panic attack: “You’re on first.”
Shit. I wanted to ask him if he could put someone else first, but I didn’t know how things worked. I didn’t want to upset him or seem unprofessional—even though it was a night dedicated to unprofessionals.
So I had to cowboy up. “You got it!”
“Here’s how it works: I’m gonna go on stage and call each comic’s name. When I say your name, you better be by the side of that stage waiting. Come up during the applause, and you got five minutes to do your set. At four minutes and thirty seconds, a red light will go on. You won’t miss it cause it’ll be shining right in your eyes. Make sure you get off that stage at five minutes so I don’t have to go up there and yank you off. That’s it.”
Here’s what I didn’t know back then: Amateur nights and open mics aren’t really a way for clubs to look for new talent; they’re a way to make extra money. Instead of waiting until people are done with dinner and ready to go to a comedy show with professional headliners, the club can open a few hours early, invite the wannabes to perform, and either charge them to get on stage or require that they bring a certain number of friends, who each have to pay a cover charge and drink minimum.
When the show started, there were ten coworkers there to support me, ten friends there to make fun of me, ten strangers there who couldn’t give a shit about me, and ten other comics there who were just thinking about their own sets.
TuRae came on stage and warmed up the audience. I looked around and saw my friends cracking up and enjoying themselves. I began to worry that everyone would stop laughing and just stare silently at me when I walked on stage next.
My throat went dry, and sweat trickled down my forehead as TuRae got ready to introduce me. “Keep in mind you’ve seen none of these comedians anywhere. With that being said, let’s get the show started with our first amateur coming to the stage: Ladies and gentlemen, Lil’ Kev the Bastard!”
I ran in place a little and shook my body to snap out of the fear and get into the moment. I repeated to myself: Energy, energy, energy. That’s what I thought comedy was all about. Then I ran on stage and exploded in a hot mess of overenthusiasm.
“Wassup, wassup, wassup!” I yelled into the void.
The lights on stage were brighter than I’d imagined. It was hard to see individual faces in the audience. But I could feel them staring at me, waiting to laugh. I needed to make them crack up . . . somehow. “Yeah, yeah, wassup!” I also needed to stop saying “wassup.” Everyone knows what’s up: This here comic is about to get tomatoes thrown at him.
I gotta move on. “You know the bus man?” Silence. “You ever see that guy?” Silence. Kev, you gotta stop asking questions. “What’s up with that guy?” Shit, that’s a question.
The more nervous I got, the quicker I spoke. “That guy like a pervert. Man be grabbing everybody, putting his dick on everybody that walks by. Ungh, ungh, ungh. Yeah, man smelling seats and stuff cause some lady with a fat ass just sat on ’em.”
Suddenly, I heard it: a laugh. No—a few laughs. Lights were in my eyes and laughter was in my ears and the cold steel of the microphone stand was in my hands. And it felt good. Better than sex.
Well, almost as good as sex.
It was the feeling of acceptance, of success, of your friends enjoying your company, of a three-point shot, of your mom telling you she’s proud of you.
Riding the high of that feeling, I soared with confidence and flew through the rest of my set.
“Then, you know, there’s that person on the bus that stinks, and when they get up, for some reason you worry that maybe it’s you that smells. So you smell the seat just to make sure it was them—and then all of a sudden you realize, you the pervert that be sniffing seats.”
More laughter, even louder than before. I got this.
I went into a joke that I thought at the time was Eddie Murphy–level material. It was about getting robbed by a midget. The punchline was: “He didn’t even have a gun. He just kept head-butting me.” Again, the laughter came.
Before I knew it, I was done. It felt good to have just said my last joke and made it through this trial-by-laughter successfully. There was just one small problem: I was still standing on stage, and the red light hadn’t gone on yet. I was so nervous I’d raced through five minutes of material in like three minutes. It was like having sex, then patting yourself on the back for your great performance while she’s still lying there unsatisfied.
“Man, I’m so glad to be here!” I stalled.
I had to use up my time somehow. Everyone was staring at me, waiting to see what was next. The anticipatory anxiety before my set had been tough, but it was nothing compared to the awkward silence on stage. Everyone could see me struggling. I felt frozen in place. I tried to remember the material I’d removed. “Okay, uh, another thing . . . ” I was going to have to slow down the couple of jokes I had left to make it to five minutes.
Suddenly, from the darkness of the audience, one of my brother’s friends yelled, “Yeah, Kev, yeah!” A few other people joined in, and I thought, Yeah, Kev, you can do this.
I reinserted a joke I had cut about people getting tattoos with Chinese writing. “You don’t really know what it means. All you know is what they tell you, and they tell you that it means all of this crazy spiritual stuff. But you’re probably walking around with the Chinese words for ‘salt,’ ‘pepper,’ and ‘ketchup’ on your back.”
Another peal of laughter and clapping got me back into a flow. Going slower was awkward, but the laughs actually got bigger. I’d already learned my first lesson in performing: Slow it way the fuck down, because stage fright is an accelerator pedal. A couple of jokes later, the red light finally came on. “Okay, guys, I gotta get off,” I told them. “They’re giving me the signal.”
The room erupted with applause, whistling, screaming. It was probably just my friends being my friends, but it felt good. As I walked off stage, exhilarated and relieved, TuRae clapped me on the back and said, “Good set. Good job, man.” I basked in those words.
I grabbed a seat next to Spank, and he gave me the nicest compliment in the history of our friendship: “Yo, man, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
It took just five minutes for me to fall in love with stand-up comedy. Everything was a high: the stage, the lights, the microphone, the nervousness, the host announcing my name, the sound system blasting my voice, the faces staring up at me, the experience of sharing the weirdest parts of my mind, the laughter, and the applause.
I felt like I could do this again. I wanted to do this again. I wanted to do this all the time.
31
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